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Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890-1940
West of Highway 81, there lies another Kansas. While it accounts for two-thirds of the state's land area, it is sparsely populated and nearly desert dry. Before 1940, it was still distinctly rural-a place that some residents called the "Edge of the World."
Several generations of the Miner family have lived and farmed in Ness County, providing Craig Miner with a rich and very personal backdrop for this heartfelt and compelling portrait of western Kansas. In Next Year Country he recounts the resilience of his fellow Kansans through two depressions and the Dust Bowl, showing how the region changed dramatically over fifty years--not for the better, some might say.
In this striking regional history, Miner blends the voices of real people with writings of small-town journalists to show life as it was really lived from 1890 to 1940. He has fashioned a richly textured look at determined individuals as they confronted the vagaries of raw Nature and learned to adapt to the machine age. And he captures the drama and vitality of rural and small-town life at a time when children could die in a blizzard on their way home from school, in a place where gaping holes of cellars and wells from abandoned homesteads posed real hazards to nighttime travelers.
No mere nostalgic reverie, Miner's book chronicles the hard challenges to these Kansans' ambitious efforts to create a regional economy and society based on wheat, in an area once thought only marginally suitable for cereal crops. His diverse topics include the history of agricultural experiment stations, new approaches to irrigation, and the impact of the tractor and the combine; the role of women's clubs in developing culture, the growth of higher education, and the rise of the secession movement; and how people responded to pests, from prairie dogs to grasshoppers, and to radical groups, from the IWW to the KKK.
Next Year Country depicts the kind of rugged individualism that is often touted in America but seldom seen anymore, a testament to how people dealt with both Nature and transformative change. It is both a love song to Kansas and the best kind of regional history, showing that life has to be taken on its own terms to understand how people really lived.
Book Details
- Publisher: University Press of Kansas
- Publish Date: Sep 6th, 2006
- Pages: 392
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.04in - 6.30in - 1.25in - 1.62lb
- EAN: 9780700614769
- Categories: • United States - State & Local - Midwest(IA,IL,IN,KS,MI,MN,MO
About the Author
Craig Miner, the " dean of Kansas history," was Willard Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History at Wichita State University. His books include the classic West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas, 1865-1890 and Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000.
Praise for this book
"The sense of place west of the 96th meridian is captured extremely well in this book. Often while reading it, I felt I was transported to western Kansas."--Agricultural History
"This volume brings the high plains to life. . . . For historians of the American West, and particularly Kansas, the stories Miner tells are not atypical, but the freshness and immediacy of his descriptions of so many modest hopes and dreams begin to add up, drawing the sympathetic reader into the network of small town life. This is the crowning achievement of the book. So many factors were beyond the control of western Kansas farmers and businessmen--the climate, railroad connections, wheat prices, federal programs--that the pluck amply illustrated through Miner's retelling of small town news seems heroic."--American Historical Review
"A major contribution to regional history, describing the relationship between humans and (an often hostile) environment."--Western Historical Quarterly
"In this delightful book, historian Craig Miner narrates the history of western Kansas. . . . Constructing a richly detailed, lively, and thoroughly engaging narrative, Miner draws on extensive research in thirty-five local newspapers and over twenty manuscript collections."--Great Plains Quarterly
"An informative and engaging narrative history, enlivened by numerous examples drawn from contemporary local newspapers and photographs gleaned from archival and personal collections. Highly recommended."--Choice
"Miner paints a complete portrait of a people shaped by their perennial struggle with nature."--Kansas History
"This sequel to West of Wichita took two decades, and the result is well worth the wait. . . . Miner's passion for the high plains of Kansas add to the substance and eloquence of this excellent narrative history. Miner is sympathetic to the region and understands . . . what makes Western Kansas work. . . . Miner carefully weaves the common threads of the lows and highs of five decades into an intelligible fabric, showing how residents adapted, survived, and became stronger (or left the region) as a result of the experiences. Integrating quotations from newspapers, diaries and letters, Miner lets representative people tell the stories of bad times and good on the farms and in the towns."--Wichita Eagle
"Meticulously researched and beautifully written by an accomplished historian with roots in the region, Next Year Country is a worthy sequel to West of Wichita, Miner's excellent history of western Kansas during the settlement period. Here, Miner chronicles the economic and social development of this unforgiving land from the drought and political turmoil of the 1890s through agriculture's short-lived Golden Age of the 1910s and the farm depression and Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 1930s. It is a story that is both sobering and inspiring."--Hal S. Barron, author of Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930
"A lively, engaging, and well-written volume that captures the history of western Kansas and Kansans in their own words and on their own terms."--Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, author of Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwest Kansas